Hytale's out now and its devs are advising those suffering download issues or errors to keep plugging away

Update: Slikey has posted a fresh tweet about Hypixel's efforts to tackle Hytale's teething issues. "We are already working on a patch for bugs and crashes," it reads. "That will hit the pre-release patchline once we have a good chunk of fixes. We are working on any auth issues. Please make sure your time is synced and also saw a report about Norwegian OS language causing issues."

Hytale's early access went live a short time ago as I write this. While plenty of folks look to have gotten in already, its devs have issued some guidance for the many others who've reported running into error messages or having their downloads stick.

The team lead by Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme who've swiftly resurrected the Minecraft-esque sandbox after buying the rights from Riot Games had predicted launch day might see some teething troubles due to a bottleneck of eager Hytalers, and it certainly seems those concerns weren't misplaced.

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Shush, Helldivers 2's Redacted Regiment warbond is all about being sneakily stealthy and silently suppressed

Be very, very quiet. I'm hunting bugs. Or so will say the folks who don the gear of Helldivers 2's next warbond. It's dubbed Redacted Regiment and it's all about looking stealthy in a tactical fashion. As opposed to simply trying to hide in a corner because you're a coward, as I've unashamedly done numerous times while serving Super Earth.

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“Lore should not be a strict set of rules," says Hytale developer in a tribute to player "archaeology"

Minecrafty fantasy sandbox Hytale will finally launch into early access today, a few months after being rescued from cancellation by Hypixel server co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme. In development for over a decade, it’s a bid to “redefine the block-game genre” that features procedurally generated biomes and RPG-style dungeon delving. Unlike the earliest instalments of Minecraft, it will also ship with some pretty fleshed-out lore.

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Arc Raider devs want future Expeditions to be less about fat stacks and FOMO

Arc Raiders recently concluded its first Expedition, this being a voluntary, narrative-led character reset achieved by hoarding and donating resources over a set period. The idea is vaguely that you’re funding a mighty caravan to the boondocks. In return, you’ll get tiered rewards such as faster progression, bonus skill points and a larger stash. Participation in Expedition is split across various stages with different completion requirements – the final leg of the first one saw players amassing non-specific items worth hundreds of thousands of coins.

Being opt-in, Expeditions are designed to be a gentler alternative to the playerbase-wide seasonal ‘prestiging’ mechanics or progression wipes of other online games. Developers Embark say just over a million people took part in the first Expedition – Arc Raiders has sold around 12 million copies to date – with "something close to about 35% or 40%” of those players bagging the full set of Expedition skill points, in the words of design director Virgil Watkins.

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Fallout: London hasn't developed into a Fallout 4-esque hub of new quest and expansion mods so far, and its lead has theories why

Who mods the mods? A bunch of people, or so was the hope of Fallout: London developers Team FOLON when they released their total conversion of Fallout 4 back in 2024. So far, there've been plenty of tweaks and smaller scale additions to the mod's version of the post-apocalyptic English capital, but no new quests or world expansions of note.

Things playing out that way to this point - despite Team FOLON having been very open in encouraging other modders to have a go at making such creations - is something Fallout: London project lead Dean 'Prilladog' Carter's clearly aware of, and he's offered a few theories as to why it might be the case.

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"AI is bad, game will be deleted" concludes developer behind sloppy Steam card battler, before setting the self-destruct timer

"AI is bad, game will be deleted 30.1" reads the headline of the latest a Steam update post about Hardest, a rock-paper-scissors-themed roguelike card battler which includes AI-generated assets. "AI is evil, and game will be deleted 30.1" adds the sub-heading of that same update post, just in case the first line didn't make the situation clear enough.

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Having asked Division devs to lay themselves off, Ubisoft are now cutting 55 jobs at Massive and Ubisoft Stockholm

Ubisoft expect to lay off 55 people across Tom Clancy's The Division developers Massive in Malmö, Sweden and cloud computing studio Ubisoft Stockholm, as part of wider cost-cutting. Reportedly, the job-lossenings are necessary because not enough workers have participated in an earlier voluntary redundancy scheme at Massive.

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Fired GTA 6 devs suffer setback in legal fight against Rockstar as UK court denies request for interim relief

GTA 6 developers fired by Rockstar last year on the charge of leaking information about the upcoming game have been denied interim relief, as they and their allies at the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain begin their legal case against the company for alleged union-busting.

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Mama's Sleeping Angels is a Lethal Company-esque, dream-exploration, Y2K smorgasbord for the zillenialpha generations

Isn't it funny that we don't have a definitive reason as to why we dream? We have ideas, theories, like that they're the brain moving memories from short-term to long-term storage. But why the hell can they get so weird? And worse, scary. This feels like the central question at the heart of Mama's Sleeping Angels, an upcoming Lethal Company-esque procedurally generated dream-exploration game where you're having a sleepover with friends and must feed a goddess within her dream.

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Big Hops, out today, is as delightful to play as it is to look at

It feels quite fitting that a game like Big Hops released today, the day after Awesome Games Done Quick wrapped up, because this thing feels like it has a guaranteed spot in Summer Games Done Quick already. You're a frog! Who hops around! What's not to love? It helps that the platformer feels so good in motion, too.

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Here's a taste of what Arc Raiders would look like in first-person, though you're too late to try it yourself

There is a strange deliciousness in experiencing a game from a perspective that it does not otherwise allow. Sure, things don't always look right, there's just this opportunity to rethink how you view a particular world. Recently, it appears that someone playing Arc Raiders got to do just that, by switching it into a first-person shooting mode as opposed to its usual third-person camera, all thanks to an accident.

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Restore mysterious cassette tapes from a missing, occultish musician in the very Her Story like Imprinted

What's the genre called for games that recreate a desktop PC interface? There's gotta be a name right, there's enough games to justify it, but PC game is kind of already taken as a term. In any case, while we ponder over that question, let's look at an upcoming addition to that genre, Imprinted, a horror game where you are tasked with restoring mysterious, damaged cassette tapes.

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Detectives detect detectively in the demo of moody noir sleuth sim Obsidian Moon

Lighting up my fifteenth cigarette of the hour and adjusting my fedora, I slipped the mysterious code into the box. A collection of numbers and letters designed to provide early access to the demo of a detective game. It was a hot tip from a public relations person on behalf of developers Lost Cabinet Games. That wasn’t suspicious. Well, assuming the missing furniture is metaphorical rather than literal.

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You can eat rats and unicorns in lip-smacking autobattler Dunderbeck, and I absolutely refuse to play the demo

You cannot pet the dog in Dunderbeck, but you can assuredly eat the unicorn. Just drag its corpse over the puckering mouth on the righthand side. Alternatively, you can chuck the dead unicorn into the mincers on the left and combine the resulting horny horsemeat with other sources of... nutrition, such as rainbow-coloured turds and spoons. I do not know what foodstuffs might result. I refuse to play Dunderbeck’s demo. I watched 20 seconds of the trailer, then spent the next ten minutes brushing my teeth. Here you go.

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Ah yes, a Palworld card game is on the way, can't think of any other creature collector that has one of those

Once again it appears that Pocketpair appears to be going after a bit of Pokemon's pie, this time of the card game variety. Where the latter's started life as a physical medium, the former's attempt at such a thing, literally just called Palworld Official Card Game, announced today, looks to be of the digital-only variety, though what there is to learn about it is a touch slim overall.

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GOG's new owner will stick to its revamped classic and zero-DRM guns, but does think lessons lie in Steam's overstuffed embrace

Just before the calendar ticked over to 2026, Witcher and Cyberpunk makers CD Projekt revealed that they'd sold off their PC storefront - GOG. In a deal worth 90.7 million Polish zloty (about £18.6 million / $25 million), original CD Projekt and GOG co-founder Michał Kiciński bought the storefront and has now offered some words about his vision for its future in a Steam-dominated market.

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Peter Molyneux's final game Masters of Albion will release in April - "it's the culmination of my life’s work"

Peter Molyneux and 22cans will release their new god sim Masters of Albion on Wednesday 22nd April via Steam. They’ve also pumped out a new trailer, rich in accents, exploding barrels and stone circles. If it were a game from any other developer, I’d be modestly anticipating it. But it’s a Molyneux joint - his last game before retirement, allegedly - so instead, I’m looking at it with a mixture of sadness and suspicion.

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The Division: Definitive Edition looks like it may be a thing, assuming this poster in Japan's the real deal

A poster advertising a definitive edition of Tom Clancy’s The Division appears to have been spotted by folks attending a Ubisoft-run eSports event in Japan. At least, that's assuming this isn't some elaborate ruse designed to draw in spies from other game studios, while only Jack Ryan can see what's truly going on.

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This week in PC games: Hytale, Quarantine Zone, a weird Batman sim, and a fresh batch of RPGs and shooters

Happy Mawday all! This week, I'm thinking about how we can expand our bestiary of Maw manifestations. When describing the beast, we often resort to stock Lovecraftian imagery of a kaleidoscopic kerfuffle of teeth and tentacles, but the Maw’s appearances aren’t always so pulpy and cinematic. Sometimes, it just looks like a blinking cursor, or an expectant child, or a feeling of guilt about not returning a text message from an old friend. Sometimes, it looks like an audience of people who want to read about new PC games.

Come, depress yourself with me as we tot up possible indicators of Maw activity. Alternatively, read about some of those aforesaid new PC games. Thanks very much to Editor King Julian for suggesting the majority of titles on this list, which he has been doing with disturbing efficiency of late.

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I spilled a full mug of tea over my work laptop – make me feel better by sharing your own broken PC stories

On Friday, while on the phone to friend of this parish Jeremy Peel, I knocked an entire mug of tea over my laptop. I won't immortalise in text what I said in that moment; it's for the best that those curses are lost to the aether.

I immediately shut down the PC, mopped it clean with a kitchen towel, and flipped it over, leaving it splayed open to air dry. I even went so far as to plonk it down in front of a dehumidifier to really sap the tea out of the machine.*

There it sat for two days, a modern day Schrodinger's laptop. Possibly fine. Possibly broken.

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